5 Major Blog Changes I Made for Growth in 2019

May 12, 2019

Tampa Blogger Amanda Burrows from the blog Affordable by Amanda is walking down Central Avenue in Downtown St. Pete. She is wearing a pink Top Shop mini pinafore dress and heels. She is looking back. She is crossing the road. This blog post talks about the 5 major blog changes Amanda Burrows made for growth in 2019.

I’ve been doing this blogging thing for almost 5 years now. 5 years! I started out my journey in college and my passion for becoming an Influencer/Blogger quickly took over my entire life. All I could dream about was posting to social media and making money in the process to stay afloat.

Of course, not everything is coming up roses. I still fail and take my failures with me onto the next activity. There are plenty of campaigns that I pitch, apply for, and never hear back from. Those crickets only fuel my fire to kickstart a brand new idea to pitch to someone else.

Failing is obviously part of the success trajectory. If you didn’t have examples of “failure” to show as you start your business, then you wouldn’t be a success story in my opinion. Some of my best ideas come from the result of failing! Failing doesn’t mean you didn’t give something your all — sometimes we just need to reprioritize things and adjust our environment to continue going forward in a new, better direction.

Since the start of blogging full-time, I’ve constantly worked on making changes to each part of my business. From interacting with friends on Facebook to adding backgrounds to my Instagram Stories, there are slight changes that have helped me improve my online presence.

I wanted to take time today to jot down each of these blogging changes that I’ve recently done over the past few months. Implementing these changes has significantly helped me achieve higher engagement on both my Instagram photos and blog views.

1. Invest in Tailwind

My first example of making a major blogging change for the better includes investing in Tailwind. I had the free trial version of Tailwind for the longest time, but I chose to upgrade my membership to pay the yearly fee about a month ago.

I am glad I chose to upgrade my membership because now I have the ability to schedule pins for optimal performance! Yes, the fee is approximately $119, but I’ve already noticed a huge jump in blog traffic because of the time I continue to dedicate to learning and understanding this powerful app.

tailwind for pinterest how to schedule a pin with pinterest for your blog growth in traffic.

Tailwind basically does all of the hard work for you. The platform creates time slots for your pictures to go live at the best times during the day or night, depending on your engagement. I am happy to have made this addition to my blogging business as it’s already helped me gain more traction to new and old blog posts.

Pro Tip I Learned From Danielle Gervino:

What I like to do is take my images and pop them into Canva to adjust the dimensions for Pinterest. I make any image have the dimensions of “1000×1500” pixels. I download the new image and upload it to my Tailwind drafts. I enter the appropriate hashtags I want to include for each picture and then set it live using the schedule given to me by Tailwind!

The bonus features to investing in Tailwind? Tribes! I have joined three Tribes on the app to start mixing in my own content with other people’s work. The tribes I am part of are focused on style and beauty, which are two of my main categories. I publish a few style photos that accompany my blog posts into each Tribe so other people can re-pin my images, too. When you get other users involved in putting your images on their Pinterest, you can create more opportunities to see a huge traffic increase on your blog pages.

In the Tribes, I make sure to boost other people’s pins as much as I upload my own. It’s not fair to disregard other images in the Tribe to solely promote your own. Other people have worked just as hard as you to create awesome content, so I believe it should all be shared equally! I usually take an additional step and thank the girls who have shared my content in private messages, too.

The Takeaway: Tailwind the ultimate promotion strategy for social shares.

Try it out for yourself (on me!) when you use THIS LINK. Tailwind has made my blogging life so much easier these days in terms of growing my Pinterest page. After overhauling all of my pins, I am now confidently sharing the right images to make my Pinterest page more attractive than ever before.

2. Hone in On Past Brand Relationships

Another change I’ve made over the last few months is to stop pitching myself into the abyss. Yes, I send out approximately 10 pitch e-mails per week to new brands that have yet to work with me before, but I am also taking a step back from pitching.

To achieve the best type of blogging success (financial + analytical), one must evaluate his or her previous work to see if there could be potential collaborations with brands from campaigns in the past.

For example, I have a great contact at Bealls Outlet and I’ve been fortunate to partner with the brand for three separate blog posts! How did I land each one of those repeat blog posts you may be thinking? I went to the drawing board and pitched myself as someone who would make a great on-going collaborator.

The Takeaway: Reach out to old brands you’ve previously worked with to inquire about new campaigns.

I reached out to my contact via e-mail and pitched my ideas to work together on two more occasions. Recently, I partnered up with Bealls Outlet to show off some new spring arrivals at the department store. It’s also a great idea to continue working with the same brands to show your audience how much you truly LOVE the brand and it proves examples of authenticity.

Stop wasting your time reaching out to brands that don’t know you exist! Bealls Outlet KNOWS I am a trusted Florida influencer to work with because of our awesome collab history. Take my advice and scroll through your business e-mail right now to search for old contacts. Ask these people if they have any campaigns coming up and let them know that you would be interested in working with them again to create new content.

There is absolutely NOTHING WRONG with reaching out to old contacts via e-mail. I do it all the time. You could miss out on a major future opportunity if you decide to never interact with a PR contact ever again. If you have one successful campaign together, who says you can’t have 2 or 3 more? I say put aside your “fear” of coming across as an “eager” blogger and just go for it. I am very grateful that I continued to reach out to old brand contacts to find new ways to partner together. The plan is to craft the right campaign idea to inspire the social media coordinator to spark interest in working with you again!

3. Shooting New Content With a Blogger Friend

One of the coolest parts of blogging is the community. I feel like the Tampa Bay bloggers are all one big family and I love rooting for each of us to succeed!

Whenever one of my TB blogger friends lands a campaign, it’s an exciting moment to celebrate. I am definitely someone who will leave a comment and reach out to tell my friend how I excited I am to see the finished product!

tampa blogger amanda burrows is wearing a navy ruffle dress from francesca's holding a matcha tea from Intermezzo Coffee. She is standing outside Green Bench Brewing. She is wearing Ray Ban Sunglasses and carrying a round rattan circle bag. She is smiling at the camera and standing next to jasmine flowers in St. Petersburg, Florida.

DRESS || BAG || HAIR BARRETTE

It comes down to community over competition. This phrase keeps popping up in my head because I see a lot more Influencers using Instagram as a platform to interact with people and sometimes the haters can get us down! Or, quite frankly, my own brain can turn into my own worst enemy and start nitpicking my content for me.

Recently, my friend and fellow Tampa blogger Sara and I have had two opportunities to shoot photos together. One the first trip, we traveled up to Dade City to shoot in the middle of a wildflower field. Those pictures ended up becoming some of my all-time favorites!

The Takeaway: Collaborate with friends and other local bloggers in your area to save time and knock out a bunch of looks at once.

It was such an EASY process for the two of us to capture photos for each other, too. We knew exactly the type of photo to take, what angles to pose at, and how many pictures to shoot of one look. The two of us spent the entire afternoon changing from one look to the next in order to check off a lot of styled outfits at one time.

4. Utilize Hashtag Generators + Post Relevant Hashtags to Instagram

Who else continues to “beat the Instagram algorithm” on a regular basis? I know I do! Instagram can be your worst enemy at times because the platform only shows a select few followers (uh, like 10%) your posts as soon as they go live. Such a bummer, right?

instagram and tampa blogger amanda burrows shares her tips for beating the Instagram algorithm using relevant hashtags. she also uses a hashtag generator to gain more interest on her photos on Instagram.

Well, this is a great plan for Instagram because it makes you want to invest in ads to place on your pictures so they perform better. Instagram needs to make money, too. To be the algorithm, you must apply some essential actions to keep your posts from tanking.

Luckily, there are SO many free resources out there to help you beat the algorithm and get your posts on track to success. I’ve done my own research and I have talked to my other Instagram friends to discover new methods to increase my chances of seeing engagement on each of my new posts.

The Takeaway: We all crave ORGANIC + REAL engagement.

That is a fact of the matter when it comes to running your Instagram as a business/job. Find ways to engage with all of your followers, new and old. I could publish a whole blog post on Instagram, but for now, I’m just going to talk about the positive effects of using relevant hashtags on my posts to increase my overall growth.

Tampa blogger Amanda Burrows from Affordable by Amanda shares her Instagram feed. She is talking about how to beat the Instagram algorithm on her blog and sharing her top 5 major blog changes she made for growth in 2019.

One of the other cool aspects to Tailwind is a brand new Instagram feature where you can discover the best and most effective hashtags to use on your picture. Finding relevant hashtags (that are used LESS than 100,000 times) can give you the chance to pop up on feeds of the users who have no clue who you are just yet. More eyes = more attention to your photos.

5. Listen to Advice Podcasts

Another great (free) resource to help grow your career as an Influencer in this era is podcasts.

Podcasts are easy to download straight to your phone and listen to through headphones or the Bluetooth inside your car.

I’ve learned a lot of great information from the Blogging, Unscripted Podcast by New York blogger, Danielle Gervino. Her advice podcast is better than any social media course out there. She spends up to 40 minutes on each episode diving into the ins and outs of working and living as a lifestyle blogger herself.

New York Blogger Danielle Gervino Blogging, Unscripted Podcast. Advice podcast for bloggers in the blogging industry.

Danielle offers personal examples of how she achieves continued success in the ever-changing blogging industry while providing bloggers the inside scoop to pitching to brands, negotiating with brands, accepting brand deals, and more. I can honestly say that I’ve started to implement a lot of her strategies to my own blog and business mindset. Since she has so much experience working with brands, it would be a huge mistake to overlook all of the free information she provides in each of her podcast episodes.

A few of her most popular episodes to point out include: Strategies to Boost Instagram Engagement and The Pre-Pitch Process (Media Kits, Rates). For beginning bloggers, these tips found in each new weekly episode make quite the toolkit to refer back to. Even as a seasoned blogger I am open to listening to other bloggers talk about what strategies work best for them to succeed and I can’t thank Danielle enough for starting this podcast.

I hope these blogging changes inspire you to take charge with your own accounts today. Let me know if there are any other blog changes you’ve made recently that have helped you improve growth with your blog, YouTube channel, Instagram feed, or any other major platform you use to generate revenue.

The Comments

Jessica

March 8, 2020

This is great Amanda! So helpful! Thanks for sharing your tips with us.

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